HIS 242
NEP and the Roaring 1920s remarks by Professor Evans

"Communism is
soviet power plus electrification of the whole country," one of Lenin's oft-quoted
statements. Lenin, however, did not live to see that dream come true. See another example of this slogan being used.

Ok, the Bolsheviks "won" the civil war, but the situation in Russia by early 1921 was not good. Let's review:

Consider
the impact of the 1917 Revolutions, the civil war, the allied
interventions, the 1920 Russo-Polish War, the independence of previous
parts of the Russian empire (like the Baltic states and Poland), the
flight of Russians abroad.
Russia lost a lot of people, land and economic production. By
1921, there really was no Russian economy to speak of. Industrial
production might have been 20% of the 1914 level, and agricultural
production was maybe a third. Horses, cattle and sheep were
gone. There was no real monetary system anymore. It is only
a guess but Russia might have lost fifteen million people dead plus a
lot more in cases such as Poland which was no longer part of
Russia. The standard-of-living had reached rock bottom.

The situation was really not good.

By early 1921, there were
peasant uprisings everywhere. Some of these were loosely
organized in what was called the "Green Movement." This was a
real threat to Bolshevik power.

Workers strikes has also
erupted in the winter of 1920-21, including strikes in Moscow and St.
Petersburg. Remember the Bolsheviks represented the workers and
carried out the revolution in the name of the workers; it was not a good
sign that workers were now expressing discontent. In some cases
martial law had to be imposed on the workers.

Famine broke out in
Russia and Ukraine in 1921-23 on an unprecedented scale for modern
times. It was only foreign aid from West European and American
CAPITALIST organizations (Can you imagine how painful it was for Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders to accept that?) that prevented an even greater
catastrophe. Still perhaps 5 million people died. It was
not a good sign that the Bolsheviks could not even feed their own
people.

And then the
Kronstadt rebellion occurred 1-18 March 1921 just as the Bolshevik's
Tenth Party Congress was getting ready to open in Moscow.

Kronstadt had been the main tsarist naval base, located on an
island not far from St. Petersburg, home of the
Baltic fleet. Its sailors had long been extremely radicalized and one of the most reliable
forces that the Bolsheviks could call on in times of trouble. During 1917
the Kronstadt sailors played a key role in the seizure of power.

By early 1921, the sailors were
not happy. They did
not like the forced grain requisitions--Most sailors still had ties to
their villages--and they were aware of Bolshevik
repression of worker strikes in St. Petersburg. The sailors also
resented the Bolshevik party dictatorship, and so they decided to
revolt and call for
an end to party privileges, for free elections
to the soviets and the summoning of a new constituent assembly.
The sailors still saw themselves
as loyal to the soviet cause; maybe not to the Bolshevik communist
rulers.

The
Kronstadt revolt was a major blow to the prestige of the Bolsheviks, so they had to come up with
something. On 2 March the Bolsheviks blamed the revolt on
various reactionary forces (The Bolsheviks were never good at telling the truth.),
and they prepared to assault the Kronstadt rebels. Time was extremely short, for if the ice
melted between the mainland and the island, then there would be no way for the Bolsheviks to deal with Kronstadt.

Trotskii was sent to Petrograd
to organize the assault under the command of Mikhail
Tukhachevskii--Surely this was about as black a day as possible in
their careers, but neither refused. On 7 March 1921 guns from St.
Petersburg began a bombardment
of the island while Trotskii assembled a force of around 50,000 troops
bolstered by volunteers from the party congress. Over
the course of the next ten days three bloody
assaults were launched against the fortress--Red army troops were
sometimes sent into battle at gunpoint. Troops charging across the
ice were slaughtered, but they gradually depleted the strength of the
rebels. Eventually, in a brutal night assault the
Bolsheviks forced their way into Kronstadt. The revolt was
crushed. Exact casualties are impossible to come by, but most
historians accept the figure of about 10,000 Red Army dead. It is
also clear that thousands of Kronstadt rebels were executed and
thousands more sent to Siberia.

Against that backdrop,
the 10th Party Congress met in Moscow; it was not in a triumphant
mood. It was at this congress that Lenin introduced the New
Economic Policy (NEP), which provided for a kind of mixed economy, or
market
socialism. The basic features of NEP were that

Peasants now would pay a
fixed tax, based on their income/wealth. At first this was a tax in
kind, but it later could be paid in money. Anything that a peasant
produced beyond that fixed amount, he was free to market as surplus.

Medium and small economic and industrial
enterprises were removed from government control.

The
state did
retain control of the so-called commanding heights of the economy (the
largest industries, foreign trade, banks), which meant that the state
still controlled about 90% of industrial production. The
government did embark on some economic planning for control of this
sector.

Lenin lead this economic "retreat"
because, in his view, Russia was just not
yet ready for communism. Although there is some disagreement
on
interpreting Lenin's exact intent with respect to NEP, it is pretty
clear to me, that he thought Russia would need a long period of this
"alliance" (smychka) between peasant and worker to prepare for the
communist future.

With Lenin's death in 1924 (and
de facto incapacitation since 1922), it was Nikolai Bukharin
(1888-1938), who became the chief spokesman for NEP. Bukharin had
joined the Bolshevik party in 1906, worked abroad from
1911 to 1917 and supported Lenin in 1917. With the advent of NEP,
Bukharin aligned himself with Lenin's idea of a slow approach to
Russian industrialization, and after Lenin's death, Bukharin became the
main supporter of the pro-peasant policy-implications of NEP. His
1925 slogan, "Enrich yourselves," would come back to haunt Bukharin
later in his political struggles with Stalin.

NEP came to a rather abrupt end with the adoption of the
first Five-Year Plan by Stalin in 1928 and Stalin's consolidation of political control.

17 April 1925, Bukharin gave the classic formulation of
NEP policy in a report to a conference of Moscow party activists,
"Enrich yourselves"; contrast that
with the complaints of
Don peasant Ivan Khomich
(22 February 1927).